How We “Made” $70,000 In Our First Month In Crypto

Here at Cryposis.io, our team has been together for only a short time.

That said, in our first full month as crypto investors, we “made” over $70,000 USD….

No wait! $40,000.

No wait! $30,000.

No wait! $45,000.

Argh, why does this portfolio fluctuate so much?

A snapshot of our portfolio’s value in USD after we started our journey in July. After an initial acquisition cost of $10,000, the value rose to almost $90,000 in a very short time, before starting a slow descent.

Isn’t volatility fun?!

The highs and lows of a crypto portfolio.

To kick start the blog here at Cryptosis.io, we decided the best thing to do would be to talk about our crazy first month in cryptocurrency, the moves we made, what we were thinking at the time, and what we’ve learned since.

We’ll also talk about our plan for Cryptosis in general, and how you can contribute if you so wish.

Disclaimer: While we’ve learned a crazy amount in the 3 months that have passed since starting our crypto story, we’re by no means trying to suggest that we’re experts or that we’ve been around for a long time.

Part of our motivation for making this site was not to portray ourselves as gurus who know everything. There’s already too much of that in the crypto space (and the world in general for that matter).

Instead, we just wanted a way to document our journey as crypto investors, and build a damn fine site in the process. While medium, reddit, and steemit have a ton of value, we feel there is room for another website dedicated to cryptocurrency.

There are, of course, already a lot of great websites out there, but we feel a “Hey look at us beginners sucking it up and documenting it as we go” website could be fun, and insightful at the same time. We’ll share the investments we made and why we made them, and in future we will share the investments we’re planning to make before we’ve taken action. Make sure you subscribe to our email list to stay updated.

We’re not yet good enough or have enough of a track record to feel confident recommending investments in advance, so we’ll just stick with sharing our successes and failures for now.

So with that “We suck, follow us?” disclaimer out of the way, let’s get started on the journey.

Dipping Our Toes In

Like many people who work online a lot, we first heard of Bitcoin back in 2014, but were too stupid not to learn more and make investments back then.

One customer asked one of us if he could pay for our services in bitcoin. We laughed to ourselves. No thanks, we want real money. USD please.

D’oh.

In our defence, we were bootstrapping an online business at the time and wouldn’t have been able to invest much in Bitcoin anyway. Every dollar earned went back into the business.

Fast-forward, and the first time we seriously considered it was in January of this year, when the bitcoin price was around $900 USD. We considered making an investment of around $20,000 USD and buying 18 coins, but rightfully hesitated.

While we believed that the bitcoin price would go up and might even hit $10,000 by the end of 2017, we also knew that we didn’t really know anything about bitcoin and couldn’t jump in with a huge investment right off the bat, without even doing some more research first.

As evidence of how ignorant we were, back then we didn’t even know that you could split bitcoins up. We thought you had to buy them whole.

Everything seemed confusing at the time. “Wallets? Why do we keep coins in wallets? I thought they were digital and on the blockchain? Oh so just the key is kept in a wallet? Wait what?!”

With all this in mind, and the fact we were busy running our own businesses, we concluded to do more research and come back to this later. The ability to make such huge gains was something we wanted to pay attention to, but we also didn’t want to do anything rash, make some greedy FOMO trade, and end up regretting it.

A few weeks later, bitcoin dipped to $800 and we felt justified waiting. Stupid bitcoin, we almost lost some money there.

How smart we were not to invest then. (Or so we thought).

Note: If you’re wondering why we were thinking of making such a big initial investment, then we’ll talk about that now.

For us, just investing $900 and buying 1 bitcoin seemed like selling ourselves short. If bitcoin really did have the potential to go from $900 to $10,000 in 1-2 years, then why would we want to just make $9,000 profit? While we certainly didn’t want to throw $20,000 down the drain, it was money we had already earmarked for investing, and we very much were of the “Go big or go home” mentality.

Anyway, this desire to go big or go home made us go home. We couldn’t invest $20,000 into something unless we understood it a lot more, and we didn’t even know where to start our education…

..so we ended up getting busy with our respective businesses again and putting Bitcoin very much on a “We’ll look at this later” backburner.

Then May and June hit, and Bitcoin was making huge gains (as was Ethereum), and was approaching $3,000 in price.

The FOMO hit hard.

It wasn’t quite at the “Your mate Dave down the pub” level where everybody was talking about it, but it seemed like Facebook was suddenly full of people losing their sh*t over Bitcoin and Ethereum gains. Gains we’d missed out on.

“Argh, we would have gone from $18,000 to $60,000 in a few short months” was followed with things like:

“It’s not too late to jump in now though!”

“Yeah but now 20 coins will cost us $60,000 now. That’s more than we want to invest”

“Ok so we just buy, like 5 coins instead”

“Yeah but then when bitcoin hits $10,000 we’ve still only got $50,000”

“What if it dips back to $900 again? Let’s just wait”

“What if it doesn’t?!”

The mental hurdles you jump through when you realize how much bitcoin has gone up while you sat on the fence doing nothing! It’s crazy.

The FOMO, regret, whatever you want to call it was so bad that we still didn’t invest in bitcoin.

Whatever, it’s too complicated anyway. We missed the boat. Nevermind.

Dumbasses that we were.

Finally Getting Started

Thankfully, in late June one of our business friends gave us some solid advice.

You don’t have to invest a whole bunch at once. Just buy $500 worth of bitcoin, then put $500 into a bunch of smaller altcoins. That will let you get your feet wet, understand exchanges and wallets, and you can scale up from there if you want.

Give that man a beer. Such sensible advice.

As it happened, crypto was having a bit of a dip. Ethereum had crashed from its $400 price earlier and Bitcoin was also retracing.

So a few days later we bought 1 Bitcoin for about $2,300, and some Ethereum for about $180 a coin. This “slowly building your way up” strategy was much easier to cope with, and we were learning a lot just by taking action. We even figured out wallets. Amazing.

…and then a week later we dropped $7,000 into Coinbase, sent some Bitcoin over to Bittrex, and bought 1,000 Antshares (Now known as NEO).

Ok, so much for slowly scaling in.

Why Antshares? Why Such A Big Move?

We’d been put onto Antshares by the same friend who told us to slowly scale in (so we definitely owe him a beer or two now), and it was the first altcoin we looked into.

The fact it was only about $7 at the time, and had recently retraced down from $15 was an interesting proposition for us. We knew we’d not be buying in at the all-time high and making a FOMO trade, but at the same time, we were desperate to make up for our earlier inaction with Bitcoin.

We read a LOT about Antshares before we finally did jump in as well. We read as much as we could find, and also supplemented our reading by reading a lot about Ethereum and Bitcoin and blockchain in general, so that we could add context to our research.

Things like “Ethereum of China” seemed too good to be true, but also plausible. This reddit article in particular made a compelling argument, but what was great about it was the discussion taking place in the comments below.

Note: The authors of this article understand and respect Neo a lot more than to just consider it the Ethereum of China.

There seemed to be a lot of well thought out arguments being made, rather than just hype and lambo talk.

We did some more research, and waited to make sure we still thought it was a good idea after initial excitement had died down.

In the end, we felt like we could afford to lose $7,000, and while we had no idea if Antshares would ever go up to $500 or some crazy price like that, we felt confident it’d at least go up to $10 or $20, and that seemed like a decent enough investment.

So we bought 1,000 Antshares for about $7 per coin.

Awesome, let’s do this!

The next day Antshares fell to about $5.50 per coin.

Oh for f*ck’s sake.

The next month was awesome…mostly

Despite that initial dip, we weren’t really worried. We knew coins fluctuated and even the snail-paced stock market sees things go up and down. We’ve made investments in stocks before, so we weren’t completely new to the greed/fear emotional rollercoaster.

So when August started to approach, we felt good about the upcoming re-branding and hoped that when Antshares became Neo, it would hit $10 or $20 by the end of the month.

Neo’s rebranded logo features a “gate”. Was it going to be the gateway to riches?

Oh how pleasantly surprised we were.

It seemed that every day Neo went up $3 or $4.

This chart documents Neo’s blistering rise and slow fall over the course of August. It was both exciting and depressing, all in the space of a few weeks.

At $10 we thought “Should we buy some more?”

“Nah, it will retrace again, buy at the dip”

At $15 we thought “Ok this is definitely not going to keep going up, buy at the dip”

At $20 we thought “Weeeeeeeeee”

We did buy a few hundred more Neo at $34, and considered ourselves super smart when it kept going up, blasted through the 40’s, and passed $50 per coin.

“We just made like $40,000 in a week”.

What an amazing feeling it was at the time. The whole market was going up, and Neo was the centrepiece. We checked our portfolio and prices on coinmarketcap multiple times per day, and it seemed like Neo had gone up $1 every single time. That’s $1,000 profit for every $1 increase.

Of course, it’s not profit until you sell, which is something we’ll talk about below.

The lambo, moon, and Neo from the Matrix gifs were all over the place, especially in this Neo Facebook group.

We learned a lot about the crypto space by watching how people reacted to Neo’s movements. People did all sorts of crazy things, like trying to time the market to sell and then buy back more later, or trying to enter at the top. Or selling when it dipped to $17.

If we’d known better, we would have seen what was coming next, and maybe cashed out. A bit of re-branding and a bunch of hype was enough to send Neo soaring, but this wasn’t going to sustain. Even though Neo was still undervalued at $50, there was of course going to be a dip later, or even a retracement.

We’re so new to all of this though, and we didn’t (and still don’t) want to play the game of trying to time the market, so we held.

Neo then had a terrible time.

It dipped from $50 down to $30, and spent a while bouncing between $30 and $40.

Then China banned ICOs, and it went as low as $17.

Then some more China FUD pushed it back down to $17 after it had recovered a little.

People were writing off NEO left, right and center.

It seemed that the masses had either lost faith in Neo and thought it was doomed, or they simply wanted to move their cash somewhere else and try to catch the next mooning coin.

These aren’t just “weak hands”, they’re people who probably only invested in Neo in the first place because they were trying to catch the ride up.

This is crypto though, and we learned as much from this period as we did from the more successful periods. Simply put, you don’t know what kind of trader you are until the bad times come.

Our advice here is simple. Remember why you invested in the first place.

With Neo, many people left simply because they thought “How could the Chinese Ethereum still be worthwhile if ICOs are banned?”

For us, the answer was simple. It’s not the Chinese Ethereum, it’s much more than that.

We held when it went back down to $30 for the first time, we held when China FUD sent it down to $17, and we held when it seemed like the wheels had fallen off Neo.

However, we also didn’t want to rely solely on one single coin.

By this point, we’d already started learning about other coins and had invested in a few of them. We almost got into Omisego at $3, but wanted to do more research first (at least this time we knew how to research), and ended up getting in a few weeks later at $7.

To be honest, we’d got kind of lucky finding Antshares and making a large investment in the first place. We didn’t really know what we were doing, we just found something that seemed plausible and went for it.

We’re not really going to explain exactly why we held Neo all through this here, because this post is getting long. Let’s just say it was obvious that Neo hadn’t lost any of its value, and the market was just in FUD-induced bear mode. We can see already that this is starting to end, and Neo’s prospects are as good as ever.

But let’s move on with the story.

What We Learned During This Crazy First Month

Now, as we’ve mentioned several times already, we’re far from experts. That said, we wanted to share a lot of the things we learned during August and September, so that we could at least justify this blog post.

1.) Facebook Groups are great for getting your finger on the pulse and learning some basic things, but take things with a pinch of salt. We’re not going to name any names, but of the 3-4 Facebook groups we joined in August, we had to unfollow 3 of them because there was so much FUD, BS, and general “noise” that it wasn’t worth having them all over our newsfeeds. It’s good to check in from time to time though, so you find out about things happening or rumors.

You just have to learn to ignore most of what’s being said, and identify the comments that are intelligent or at least not knee-jerk.

We’ll do another post soon about some of the best blogs and Facebook Groups we’ve found. Get in touch if you want to show us some more to consider.

2.) It’s a lot easier to hold when things are going up. Neo’s fall to $17 in September was depressing, and we went from checking our portfolio 3 times per hour to checking it once a day. Even though we still believed Neo and other coins were well undervalued, we also knew that the China FUD was going to influence a lot of people.

We had faith in the projects, but did we have faith in the market? That’s much harder to judge, especially as a beginner.

Hey, we’re no “weak hands”, but we’re not exactly seasoned either.

That’s why it’s called “Hold On for Dear Life”. You really do need to grasp tightly during the downturns.

3.) There’s an abundance of opportunity in the crypto space these days. Even if Neo doesn’t turn out to be as great as we hope in the next few years, there are so many new projects issuing tokens right now. In 2-3 years time they are all going to be much more competitive, so now is the time to take action.

Look at Kyber as an example. They were only able to offer 3.6 ETH individual cap to people. In 2019, projects like Kyber will probably only be able to offer 1 ETH.

Even then though, getting 5x a week after the ICO is still doable. Once you get used to these big gains, you realize that it’s not necessary to become too attached to a single project. Just get in early, take out some profits, and find something else. Check our guide on ICO investing to get all your doubts off the way.

Where Are We Now?

A few months have gone by, and we’ve learned a lot, and we’ve invested a lot more too. We’ve joined various groups, masterminds, and channels, and we’ve started to develop our own ICO strategy, which we’ll share in future posts.

Here’s a list of what we’ve invested in since that initial Antshares trade:

OMG

BNB

0x (at ICO)

Chainlink (at presale)

Enigma (at ICO)

Kyber (at ICO)

Wanchain (at ICO)

Cobinhood (at presale)

Astronaut (at presale)

Cindicator (at ICO)

Cloak

Waves (failed flip attempt)

Qtum (failed flip attempt)

AirToken (at presale)

RedPulse (Because Neo)

You may notice a lack of Ethereum or Bitcoin in that list.

That’s because while they are (relatively) more stable and safe coins, they just don’t have as many gains in them compared to others. For bitcoin to 10x, it needs to go to $40,000-$50,000. It likely will get there one day, but in the meantime, so many other tokens could get there in days and weeks.

We do plan to use profits from those to slowly increase our BTC and ETH holdings though, and cycle the rest back into future ICOs.

By the way, none of these investments so far have been us just rolling the dice and hoping for something to moon. We’ve already taken profits on several of the tokens mentioned above, at an average of 4x.

The main thing to know is that since jumping in the deep end with Neo/antshares, we’ve spent hours and hours learning, researching, and networking with influencers, and have developed some pretty good strategies and insights.

We’re still noobs, but we like to think we know what we’re doing as well. We’ve even got some mentors.

Our ICO story and strategy is best reserved for another post though, which we’ll be writing up in a few days. Make sure to subscribe so we can keep you updated.

Speaking of which, let’s wrap this article up.

What’s Next For Cryptosis.io?

As mentioned earlier on in this post, we’re going to be using this blog as a way to document our journey. We’ve already shared a large part of our trial by fire, and we’ll be giving weekly, or monthly updates as we develop as well. You can subscribe here to follow us.

We’ll also give our thoughts on upcoming ICOs, as well as commenting on coins/tokens we already hold. For example, you might see more than one post about Neo and OMG and our thoughts on them at any given time.

Who knows where this journey will take us though, perhaps we’ll evolve the site more as we evolve as crypto investors too.

Remember the name of this site. Cryptosis!

Cryptocurrencies are like drugs, and cryptosis is the condition that describes the addiction. Well, we like to think so anyway.